/lit/ - Literature

>>20129555
thanks my checked anon, you helped me find this https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/5538/did-vladimir-nabokov-know-thomas-manns-works which also has a source:
"Ever since the days when such formidable mediocrities as Galsworthy, Dreiser, Tagore, Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland and Thomas Mann were being accepted as geniuses, I have been perplexed and amused by fabricated notions about so-called "great books." That, for instance, Mann's asinine "Death in Venice," or Pasternak's melodramatic, vilely written "Dr. Zhivago," or Faulkner's corn-cobby chronicles can be considered "masterpieces" or at least what journalists term "great books," is to me the sort of absurd delusion as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair. My greatest masterpieces of twentieth century prose are, in this order: Joyce's "Ulysses"; Kafka's "Transformation"; Bely's "St. Petersburg," and the first half of Proust's fairy tale, "In Search of Lost Time.”
I mixed up mediocrities and clichés and this quote: "Nothing but cliches (a more ambitious sentence often turning out to be an accumulation of several cliches), and his humor remindful of that of Max & Moritz. Moreover, he finds Mann's psychology artificial and his characters made to develop so as to fit the author's teleological purpose" — apparently not actually a quote by Nabokov, but his wife reporting his opinion (in a letter to a 'Prof. Paul Kurt Ackermann).

>>10102455
rigged